Monthly Archive for January, 2013

Valentine’s Day (i.e. February 14) will find me at the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County campus, speaking about why More Sex is Safer Sex. The lecture is free and open to the public. Join us if you’re in the neighborhood! More details here.

A friend asked this question in another forum. Maybe you guys can help:

Many of these towns have a road whose name comes from the next town over.

In the future, there will be companies whose workforces consist entirely of robots.

I’d prefer a book whose characters weren’t so stupid.

Are these correct uses of the word whose? On the one hand, we usually reserve the word “who” for people and use “that” for inanimate objects. On the other hand, the word “that” does not have a possessive form analogous to “whose”.

Every one of these sentences can of course be rewritten to avoid the problem (“I’d prefer a book with characters who weren’t so stupid”.) But the question is whether they sound okay to you as written.

A number of commenters (at least one here and several elsewhere) have asked why we need a debt ceiling. If the Congress wants to spend less, why don’t they just go ahead and spend less?

The answer is that different spending programs command different majorities. Snip and Snap vote to fund rabbit hospitals; Snap and Snurr vote to fund trapeze subsidies; Snurr and Snip vote to fund lava lamp research. Plausibly, they’d all prefer to eliminate all these programs. Even if Snap thinks rabbit hospitals and trapeze subsidies are both great bargains, he might not be so happy about getting two for the price of three.

The frequently brilliant David Henderson seems to me to have fallen off a cliff in his (limited) defense of the recent tax bill. David thinks it’s a (relatively) good thing that under the new bill, income taxes rise only for those making over $400,000 and the estate tax is locked in only for estates over $5 million. (Relative, that is, to an across-the-board increase.)

David, in other words, seems to be saying that it’s a good thing that the tax code just got more progressive, and that a very small number of people are now going to bear a significantly greater share of the burden. I disagree.

Taxes are too high because spending is too high. But taking the path of spending as given (and David is right when he says that the delay of the sequester bodes very ill for that path), the question is not “how high should taxes be?”; that question is settled. Over time, taxes will be high enough to cover the spending. The only question is “how should the tax burden be distributed?”. The answer the politicians have agreed on is “a whole lot less equally”. They’re taking less now than they might have, but they’ll have to take more in the future, and when that time comes, they’ll have set a precedent that the rich should bear a greater fraction of the burden than they did a month ago.

It raises marginal tax rates at the top (allegedly to “Clinton era levels” but actually higher once you account for the phaseouts of personal exemptions and itemized deductions), but not for anyone else, nibbling away at the rewards for productivity, and placing an ever-greater share of the tax burden on an ever-smaller fraction of the population.

Edited to add: Greg Mankiw has pointed out to me that the phaseouts were present in the Clinton years as well, so my remark about today’s rates being “higher once you account for the phaseouts” is wrong. On the other hand, as Greg also points out, with the increase in Medicare taxes pursuant to Obamacare, total tax rates are in fact higher than they were under Clinton. Greg points to this link for clarification.

Worse yet, it increases the rates on dividends, capital gains and inheritances, encouraging wealthy people to save less, consume more, and demand a greater share of the world’s resources.

The AMT, one of the few bright spots in the tax code, is permanently “fixed”, which is to say that almost nobody will pay it now.

This deal does absolutely nothing to control entitlement spending, which means it’s 100% fiscally irresponsible. Let’s be clear about this. When you’re overspending, the fiscally responsible thing is to spend less, not to cover the difference by visiting the ATM and depleting your assets. Wealthy taxpayers are the government’s ATM; the assets the government takes today won’t be there when they need more tomorrow. Let’s say it one more time: After all the talk about “fiscal responsibility”, there is nothing fiscally responsible about this deal.